It's better known as the beating heart of industrial Wales than as a tourist destination – but Port Talbot has become the unlikely prize in a holiday competition in the USA.

It's better known as the beating heart of industrial Wales than as a tourist destination – but Port Talbot has become the unlikely prize in a holiday competition in the USA.

In an advertising campaign, millions of Americans are being asked to put their name down for the “Richard Burton Sweepstakes”.

The winner, who will be picked next February, along with a guest of their choice, will be whisked from across the Atlantic for a tour of Burton’s hometown followed by visits to other parts of Wales.

The competition coincides with the publishing of the Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Swansea University’s Professor Chris Williams.

Tourist organisation Visit Wales, which is behind the campaign, hopes to highlight Wales as a visitor destination by tempting Americans with the story of Burton’s rise from working class Welshman to one of the best known, richest actors on the planet.

His hellraising, see-sawing relationship with Elizabeth Taylor was the talk of the 1960s.

A passage from Burton’s diary, which he began when living in Caradog Street, Taibach, when he was the teenage Richard Jenkins, sums up the wealth accumulated by the miner’s son who was born the 12th of 13 children.

He said in September 1967: “I bought Elizabeth the jet plane we flew in yesterday. It costs, brand new, $960,000. She was not displeased.”

Speaking of Taylor in the same year, Burton wrote: “I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth.

“She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday’s child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her, and she loves me!”

In their advertising, Visit Wales promises Americans: “The winner and his or her guest will win an exclusive glimpse into the places, the passion and the people that shaped the iconic actor.”

The prize is a five-night, six-day trip including a chance to tour the actor’s home village of Pontrhydyfen in Port Talbot’s Afan Valley and Taibach where he grew up.

There will also be a trip to Tenby “where Burton and Elizabeth Taylor vacationed”.

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